In which our heroine, having defeated the three-headed demon of supercomputing, optimization, and ill-posed problems in her quest for the elusive Ph.D., embarks upon her new career.

Monday, March 06, 2006

Adventures in Sheer Stupidity

Is there a way to reload life? Because, if there is, I'd like to reload and replay the past twenty-four hours.

Yesterday I baked a delicious chicken. Rosemary-lemon chicken is my favorite baked chicken recipe, and I was having a craving for it so I cooked it, even though we had been out shopping all afternoon and it takes an hour and a half to bake. I didn't care. We ate after 8:00 p.m. but the chicken, along with freshly-baked seven grain French bread (thanks, Kroger!) and spinach salad really hit the spot.

At about ten, I went back into the kitchen and deboned the chicken, in preparation for making chicken soup. I love homemade chicken soup, at least the way we make it, plus I'm trying not to get the nasty cold that Jeff brought home from San Francisco. So I was really looking forward to this soup. I put the bones in a big pot, added enough water to cover the bones, added some more rosemary and a bay leaf, and put the pot on the burner to boil. I asked my husband to turn it off before he went to bed, which would be several hours later, and I went to get ready for bed. I retired with visions of chicken soup with kluski noodles and matzo balls dancing through my head.

I was rudely awakened by the sound of the smoke alarm, one hour later. I was confused, because at first I thought it was my alarm and the night had passed rather quickly. I heard Jeff bounding up the stairs from the basement. It turns out that all the water had boiled out of the pot, and the chicken carcass had caught on fire! My brave husband extinguished the fire, although there was still a lot of smoke, billowing from the kitchen. He turned off the central furnace system, opened all the windows and doors, and tried to let it all air out. But the damage was done, and the house still smells strongly of smoke, everywhere.

The pot is ruined. This morning I set it outside, because it smells really bad. There was a lot of splatter on the stovetop, but I managed to clean that up with my old buddy Softscrub. But I still felt really stupid, knowing that because I'd forgotten to go back to turn the burner down, I almost caught the house on fire. Can I give a big shout-out to my good friend the smoke detector? Thanks to its warnings, my husband was alerted to the fire before it really got out of control. I think the homeowner's insurance company is also grateful to the smoke detector.

Can I just take this time to say make sure that your smoke detectors are in working order? They might save your ass.

Unfortunately, I think that the excess smoke inhalation may have put me over the edge, so I woke up this morning with a tightness in my lungs. I'm sure that rushing into that smoke-filled room didn't help Jeff's lungs either.

Then, because life wasn't exciting enough for us yet, I discovered as I got into the car this morning that someone had broken into the car! It wasn't exactly a break-in, I guess, because the car was unlocked. Still, I was pretty upset to find that some handjob had helped himself to the cheap-ass CD player in our car. Thankfully, he was even more of a moron than I am, and didn't take the most valuable item in the whole car, namely our checkbook. I had seen it in there yesterday but had forgotten to take it inside. I'll have to do a more thorough search to see what, if anything, else is missing.

I was pretty surprised that this had happened. Adding to the irony is the fact that I had remarked to Jeff only yesterday, that I had never been robbed. But I was surprised because it seems like our neighborhood is a pretty safe place. The neighbors had said that the only crime that had happened in our neighborhood within the past year was somebody taking change out of unlocked cars parked on the road. But this particular person walked down our driveway and into the carport to check our car. I'm definitely going to ask the neighbors if they've noticed anything missing in their cars, and from now on I'm locking the car. I just didn't think I'd really need to lock the car in my own carport. I guess I was wrong.

Disclaimer

The events described in this blog are fictitious. Any similarity to any person living or dead is merely coincidental. The opinions expressed herein are my own, and do not reflect those of my (fictitious?) employer.